Re: Low latency patch worth the fuss?
"debian" == debian <iwk> writes:
debian> Hi there, I'm just ripping a few CDs' with Grip and even
debian> with nice level -20 for both ripping & encoding the system
debian> "drags" noticeably. The kernel low latency patch should in
debian> theory offer a solution by improving on the resposiveness
debian> of the system. But does it in practice? Is it really worth
debian> the fuss of recompiling the stock (debian) kernel which is
debian> working fine? Anyone got any practical experience?
I guess it depends on your hardware. I'll give you my experience and
you can go from there. I have fairly fast system: a 7200 RPM IDE
drive, a 32x IDE CD devices with an AMD XP2000 (or whatever, I forget,
it runs at 1.67 odd Ghz) and the lvcool package to keep CPU
temperature down.
On this system I use a stock 2.4.18-k7 Woody kernel, and all my music
is encoded with ogg. Over the last 15 months since I built this system
I've *never* felt I needed the low latency patch.
I don't have any idea what kind of hardware you have. But if it is
reasonably up to date the first thing I'd check is that DMA is enabled
on your drives. A default Woody install will not do this for you
automatically. And yes, if I turn DMA off I would think I have a
problem moving hunders of megabytes of data around.
Cheers!
Shyamal
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